The bugs are back! (but all is not lost)

April was the honeymoon month in my  kitchen garden, when lots of things were growing and nothing ate them but my family. Now it's May, all chance of frost is past, and many bugs are chowing down in my garden.
 OK, yes I have a degree in horticulture and  in 2003 passed the test to be a certified pesticide applicator in the state of Massachusetts, so I should not call them bugs. But disease vectors just doesn't sound right!  Now that I'm organic a lot of the chemicals I learned about are not options for many reasons, so I'm studying pest management all over again. My first defense is close observation - knowing my enemy.
Here's a list of what I found yesterday: unspecified green caterpillars (cabbage moth or winter moth, probably), slugs, snails, potato beetles, scale insects and aphids ( both black and green).
 The lettuce looked great from afar, but up close there were telltale piles of dark droppings, with caterpillars nearby. It's a big, crowded patch, which means that birds aren't able to spot the caterpillars and help me much:

So here's my plan of attack for preserving the lettuce: thinning so the birds can find the caterpillars, and spraying with spinosad, a natural pesticide for  many kinds of larvae. It's non-toxic to most beneficials, and won't hurt the birds if they eat the dead or sick caterpillars.  I could not spray today because there was so much rain on the lettuce that the spinosad would be diluted and ineffective, so tomorrow morning I'll thin, and tomorrow night I'll spray.
There is some slug damage in the  vegetable garden, but most of it is on flowers, such as this poor iris:

Here's a fat and nasty slug on a rudbeckia:

It's been so wet the slugs are thriving. To think I was worried about drought a couple of weeks ago.  I'm not sure what I'll do about the slugs-- probably cut back the plants and get the slugs off, then fertilize and hope they come back. The slugs on the iris are definitely causing a fungal problem too-- that's the vector part; the slime trails are a place for fungus to thrive. Yuck!

I've been pretty successful just hand picking and spraying aphids off the peas. Here's my first pea flowers:




My strategy for dealing with potato beetles works for squash and beans too. The first thing I do is plant small patches all over the garden, rather than all together. One patch of potatoes I inspected yesterday had lots of  potato beetles, which I handpicked, and eggs, which I crushed.

Here's a pic of the eggs on the underside of the leaves:



Other patches of potatoes had no beetles. By spreading out the plants I reduce the chance of a heavy infestation of potato beetles.

Here's a patch of potatoes I've found beetle free, so far. They are planted in the flower bed, next to geraniums and under a cotoneaster:

And so the war begins.  Everyday I walk the garden and look and touch, monitoring the plants as they grow, trying to stay ahead of all the non-humans who find my crops tasty.

Sometimes I worry needlessly, and have to laugh at myself. Here's a picture of my jerusalem artichokes covered with what I feared were whiteflies:

Then I brushed my hand across a leaf and nothing flew up, which is the characteristic whitefly response.  I looked overhead and saw a wild cherry shedding it's tiny white petals all over the garden. 

I laughed, then I kept looking for pests. I believe it's better to be vigilant and wrong than blase and hungry.